Ibn Warraq Quotes

While it is commendable and understandable to wish to protect, for example, the personnel of a publishing house, if the decision of a publisher to publish material considered blasphemous by Muslims leads to widespread violence, this violence cannot possibly be considered morally or legally the responsibility of the said publisher. The publisher, writer, comedian, cartoonist is exercising his or her constitutional right, and if threatened, the state should give, unbegrudgingly, every protection possible. Publishers must stand by their writers, newspapers with their cartoonists, Comedy Central with South Park artists, and intellectuals with their fellow intellectuals. But where was Hollywood when fellow filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, was killed? The “Draw Mohammed Day” initiative by a Seattle cartoonist, far from being frivolous was a magnificent show of solidarity, exactly in the manner of public readings of The Satanic Verses, already mentioned. Unless we show greater solidarity, massive, public, noisy solidarity and show that we care for our freedoms, we risk losing all to Islamist thuggery.

All the atrocities commited by the Pakistani army clearly shows that it was nothing but a religious war. When I read the Koran and compare the actions of the Pakistani army I find an absolute link between the killings and the provisions in the Koran. To the Pakistani military, the Bengalis were not true followers of Islam, but hypocrites. So they wanted to get rid of these nonbelievers (the Bengalis) as per the provision in the Koran and hadith. The whole world knows the truth. The truth is that the genocide in Bangladesh was conducted by the Islmic army of Pakistan to save Islam and to completely annihilate the unbelievers.

Islam makes the whole of humanity-Muslims and non-Muslims-suffer. Peaceful Muslims become victims of the oppressive psyche of Islam, which sucks all the life out of them, while non-Muslims are made to suffer at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

David Margoliouth warned us not to be too credulous about the authenticity of so-called pre-Islamic poetry. Two of his principal arguments were the probity, or rather the lack of probity, of the earliest compilers and editors of pre-Islamic poetry, and the fact that many putative pre-Islamic poems contained words, phrases, and religious concepts derived from the Koran, even though the authors had died long before the Koran can have been said to exist.

This is my very personal recount of the nights and days on and immediately after March 25, 1971. I went to bed a bit early, around 9:00 Pmt. I had been quite tired all day and I quickly fell asleep. Suddenly, at around 11:00 P.M., my deep slumber was disturbed by the noise of constant barrage of gunfire. At first I thought that it must be firecrackers by Bengalis to celebrate their victory. But soon I realized my mistake. I opened the window. It was very dark. Not even the dim streetlights were burning. But I could barely see numerous military vehicles moving around, carrying soldiers with their automatic rifles. Occasionally, I could see very bright searchlights mounted on some of the military trucks and Jeeps. Many soldiers were running and shooting in the street. I saw that a large convoy of military vehicles had surrounded the whole of the EPUET area. As far as my eyes could go, I could see military men all around the campus.

I started to question the necessity of religion in our lives and the inhuman and illogical practices in many religions, including Islam. You might wonder what triggered my distaste for religion. It all started in my school days when I witnessed the slaughter of a dear Hindu friend of mine (along with his entire family) in Chandpur, Bangladesh. I can never erase that memory from my mind. That was a devastating experience. But more shocking was that many Muslims were actually happy about that slaughter and even went further, supporting the idea that we (Muslims) should kill more Hindus because the Muslims in India are being slaughtered, too. It was also declared by some Muslim clerics that killing of non- Muslims is an act of jihad and therefore anyone participating in jihad will be rewarded with heaven. At that tender age I knew very little of Islam and nothing about other religions. However, the little conscience inside me told me that what was being done and what was being practiced were not right. However, I had little power to change the course of events. I personally visited the house of my slain friend and found that all the members of his family, including his parents, brothers, and sisters, were killed by axes and swords. I saw pools of blood in their kitchen and bathroom, where they hid to save their lives. The incident happened in the dead of night and no one came to help them. When I went back to my school, I was extremely ashamed in front of my Hindu friends. I was speechless and could say nothing. I feared that my Hindu friends might one day attack me. To my great surprise I found that my Hindu friends did not really bother very much and treated me as usual.

Then came the topic of creation of Bangladesh. Naturally, they sided with the Pakistani Islamic army, although they expressed sorrow for the lives lost. When they heard that 3 million people were massacred and that the action of the Pakistani Islamic army could not be dismissed simply as an act of restoration of peace and order, they simply laughed. The reason was that they did not believe what had happened to our people in the occupied Bangladesh. When we asked them how many Bengalis were killed, they quoted a figure of three thousand. They also insisted that those killed were mostly Hindus, so we should not bother too much about the massacre. That was to say that the killing of Hindus was all right. We pointed out that the figure of 3 million was not invented by the government of Bangladesh but the figure was from reliable foreign sources such as the Agence France Presse, Reuters, and Time magazine. We also told them that a Pakistani journalist by the name of Anthony Mascarenhas has written a book titled The Rape of Bangladesh,' where he had quoted a similar figure. The Pakistanis simply dismissed those facts and said that the foreign journalists were bribed by India to write these figures. When we asked them how did they get the figure of three thousand, they said that that figure was released by the military authorities. And what about the two hundred thousand rape cases? They were adamant that not a single woman was raped. Such is the power of Pakistani Islamic oligarchy and Pakistani Islamic military to condition peoples' minds...

Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew "of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie's] kind of statements would be explosive." That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm's previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.

His work will one day be seen as the moral and intellectual breakthrough that led to the Islamic Aufklarung.

The officer then said that my father's life would be spared but that they would have to confiscate the shotgun. Then he started interrogating everyone on various matters, including our religion and political affiliation. My father became the spokesman. He answered what the army men wanted to hear: that we are all Muslims and we had no connection with the Awami League or any pro-freedom party, and so on.

There is no such thing as the Koran.

As early as the thirteenth century, thinkers like Nur-ud Din Mubarak Ghaznavi, working at the court of Sultan Iltutmish [ruled 1211-1236] set the aggressive tone of Islamic presence in India. Nur-ud Din elaborated the doctrine of Din Panahi [protection of religion], by which Islam had to be defended from the defiling Hindus who were idolaters who must be kept in their place, and insulted, disgraced, dishonoured and defamed. Ziauddin Barani [Diyā al-Dīn Baranī: 1285-1357] who was an Indian jurist, historian, political thinker, writer, and a companion of Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq [1309 –1388], wrote a Fürstenspiegel, a Mirror of Princes, akin to Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Fatāwā-yi Djahāndārī, in order to educate the de facto rulers of the day, the sultans, in their duty towards Islam in an age of corruption. Barani advises sultans to enforce the sharī‘a, to curb unorthodoxy ( especially speculative philosophy, falsafa), to degrade the infidel, who must be treated harshly. The Sultans must fight like the Prophet until all people affirm that “there is no God but Allah.” It is the duty of Muslim rulers to overthrow infidelity, uproot it completely, and apply the Holy Law, the Sharia on all. Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309 – 1388), the Turkic Muslim who reigned over the Sultanate of Delhi (1351-1388) carried on the intolerant tradition of the early invaders, and believed that by extirpating Hinduism wherever possible he served God.

This book is first and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and anything in Islam - even to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize, and mock.

The tribesmen did not know the Koran simply because it did not exist, for it was put together piecemeal at a much later date. In other words, all the traditional accounts are hopelessly wrong.

Hadiths were liable to be fabricated even for the most trivial ritualistic details. Tendentiousness included the suppression of existing utterances friendly to the rival party or dynasty.